White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

If the House Defunds DOE, It Slashes Science

by 1 Comment

There are those who claim the greatest line of advertising ever written was “Drink Coca-Cola.” Maybe. For me, it’s the much more recent “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

In this past election, the Republicans had the phrases and the ideas that stuck. The constant repetition of “small government” left the belief that it could be done and that it was achievable, no matter that government has grown under Republicans as much as it has under Democrats.

After the tumult, Dick Armey–he of the Tea Party persuasion–introduced us to a new political animal: the small-government conservative. These are the people, according to Armey, who will dictate the conservative agenda in the House and put the spokes in the Obama wheel.

This is my profile of this new class in American politics and on Main Street: They believe the government is too big and should be radically cut. They are sworn never to raise taxes. Never. So it is a good thing they believe in cutting government.

But there’s the rub. What are they going to cut and how?

With a Democratic president and Senate, the chainsaw-wielders have only one course of action: defunding the things they don’t like, which are mostly the things they don’t understand. The Tea Party types and those they have dragged to the right of the Republican Party say, for example, the Department of Energy must go because it makes no energy; besides, it was created by Jimmy Carter. Shudder!

In truth, the Energy Department was created the way presidents create departments; to show they are doing something when they don’t know what to do. That was the genesis of the Department of Homeland Security—a true monstrosity, created by George W. Bush to show that we were serious about terrorism—and of Carter’s Department of Education.

The Energy Department’s responsibilities include the long-range, high-risk research and development of energy technology, power marketing at the federal level, the promotion of energy conservation, oversight of the nuclear weapons program, regulatory programs, and the collection and analysis of energy data.

Day to day the department tries to clean up coal, perfect batteries, improve solar cells, tend the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in salt domes along the Gulf Coast, and operate the military Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in New Mexico. It ought to be doing as much for civilian wastes at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid nixed that, along with about $10 billion of taxpayer money and some great engineering.

The Energy Department operates an extraordinary necklace of National Laboratories and Technology Centers, 20 of them.The jewels in this string are the weapons labs of Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

These labs comprise a unique national asset, unmatched anywhere. They employ thousands–that is right, thousands–of PhDs under a unique structure: The Energy Department sets the labs’ agendas and doles out the dollars, but they are operated by a mix of contractors from the university system of California to industrial firms.

To know the national laboratories is to love them. I know them.

The Energy Department has been burdened with indifferent and terrible secretaries, excepting these three: James Schlesinger, who created the department; Don Hodel, who served during the early years of the Reagan Administration; and Bill Richardson, who served under Bill Clinton.

One really wonders whether those who would hack away at the Energy

Department know what damage they would do. If the department were broken up, its functions would have to be housed elsewhere. Interior? Defense? NASA? EPA? No money would be saved.

The department is the largest science—especially physics–incubator on earth. It might more appropriately be called the Department of Science. Sure it could be better run; much duplication could be eliminated. But why close down our primary science institution?

Along with “small government,” there is a also a cry for more “math and science.” Woodsmen spare that department; prune but do not chop it down.

Wanted: Renaissance Person for Energy Secretary

by Leave a Comment

While most of Washington is fascinated with the triangle of strong personalities that President-elect Barack Obama has empowered to preside over foreign policy (Jones, Clinton and Biden), another constituency is wracked with the agony of hope. It is the bitterly divided energy constituency which hopes that a new secretary of energy will lean their way.

The most hopeful of these are the greens who have taken Obama at his word, and who expect a flood of money for wind, solar and biomass; great new jobs; and crippling limits to the use of coal and nuclear.

But there is another constituency that believes that it is the real green alternative: coal. Or, more precisely clean coal. Already, this receives nearly $1 billion a year in funding, much of it going to carbon capture and sequestration–a concept fraught with legal, political and technical difficulties but popular with the utilities and the miners. Died-in-the-wool environmentalists look at it as a trick at best and a semantic obfuscation, designed to deceive the public, at worst. Clean or otherwise, coal will be burned for decades to come–most of it in its dirty form, the experts tacitly acknowledge.

Another constituency, which was just feeling it could be listened to is nuclear. John McCain raised hopes when he talked about 45 new reactors, and nuclear advocates hoped that Obama heard that loud and clear.

Now, two clouds hang on the nuclear horizon: opposition in the Democratic Congress and the credit drought. The advocates believe they can coax the Congress to their point of view, especially with a pro-nuclear secretary. But they are not so sure about the credit markets, even with loan guarantees. A new plant could cost between $10 billion and $14 billion. That is a lot of borrowing and John Rowe, the chief of mighty Exelon Corporation, has said no utility can build the plants unaided.

Then there are the seldom heard but influential nuclear weapons hawks who would like to see a secretary who understands the aging nuclear stockpile, and worries about the effectiveness of weapons that have not been tested in a generation. They want the stockpile updated; new weapons designed and built and, if feasible, tested underground. They are said to be lead by that grand old man of Washington policy wonks, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. They point out that $20 billion of the Department of Energy’s $25 billion budget is earmarked for weapons. It goes to the somewhat autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration.

To be secretary of energy is to preside over a complex archipelago of almost totally unrelated responsibilities. The department has nuclear waste, nuclear verification, nuclear stockpiles, warhead decommissioning, and various black programs to deal with before one calorie of energy is produced.

A source with 30 years of experience in the DOE warns: “You can’t turn a battleship around in the bathtub, and budgeting here is like that.”

The department is not only remarkable in its reach but also in its staffing. It directly employs about 7,000 people. But through the big nine national laboratories, it has dominion over 130,000 people. This makes the DOE unique and, in some respects, advantages it. While the labs work on far-flung projects for other agencies, and sometimes private corporations, they are controlled and funded by DOE. One secretary told me: “It’s like having a private army. The labs, with all of their Ph.Ds will do anything so long as you fund them.”

What is certain is that the new secretary, unless he or she has had extensive experience with the department, will be shocked to learn that the DOE has little to do with energy today. It is really a series of giant sandboxes for scientists to play in.